Edgar Pangborn: Davy

To All of Us including JUDY

I’m Davy, who was king for a time. King of the Fools, and that calls for wisdom.

It happened in 323, in Nuin, whose eastern boundary is a coastline on the great sea that in Old Time was called the Atlantic — the sea where now this ship winds her passage through gray or golden days and across the shoreless latitudes of night. It was in my native country Moha, and I no more than a boy, that I acquired my golden horn and began to learn its music. Then followed my years with Rumley’s Ramblers into Katskil, Levannon, Bershar, Vairmant, Conicut and the Low Countries — years of growing, with some tasty girls and good friends and enough work. And when, no longer with the Ramblers, I came into Nuin, I must have been nearly a man, or the woman I met there, my brown-eyed Nickie with the elf-pointed ears, would not have desired me.

I learned my letters, or they called it learning them, at the school in Skoar, but actually I knew nothing of reading and writing until my time with the Ramblers, when Mam Laura Shaw lost patience with my ignorance and gave me the beginning of light. Being now twenty-eight and far advanced in heresy, and familiar with the fragments of Old-Time literature, I say to hell with the laws that forbid most Old-Time books or reserve them to the priests!

Somewhere I have picked up the impudence to attempt writing a book for you, conceiving you out of nothing as I must because of the ocean between us and the centuries that you people, if you exist, have known nothing of my part of the round world. I am convinced it is round.

My way of writing must follow an Old-Time style, I think, not the speech or writing of the present day. The few books made nowadays, barbarously printed on miserable paper and deserving no better, are a Church product, dreary beyond belief — sermons, proverb, moral tales. There is some ginger in the common speech, it’s true, but it is restricted to a simplicity that renders it, on the whole, hellishly dull — let any man not a priest use a term that cannot be grasped by a drooling chowderhead, and eyes slip sidelong in suspicion, fingers make ready for the flung stone that has always been a fool’s favorite means of putting himself on a level with the wise. And finally, English in the pattern of Old Time is the only language I could have in common with you who may exist and one day read this.

We are free men and women aboard this vessel, carrying no burden of cherished ignorance. In the country that drove us out they preen themselves on freedom of religion, which meant in practise, as it evidently did throughout Old Time, merely freedom for a little variety within the majority’s religion — no true heretics wanted, although in the last century or so of Old Time they were not persecuted as they are today, because the dominant religion of that time, on that continent, was thinned down to a pallid reminiscence of its one-time hellfire glory. The Holy Murcan Church, and the small quackpot sects that it allows to exist, were certainly latent in Old Time, but so far as one can tell at this distance, Christianity in the America of what they called the 20th Century was hardly capable of scaring even the children. On this schooner there is freedom from religion, and in writing this book for you I shall require that freedom; if the thought offends you, take warning at this point and read some other book.

Our ship, our Morning Star , follows a design of Old Time, resembling no other vessel of our day except one experimental predecessor, the Hawk , burnt at her moorings four years ago in the war of 327 against the Cod Islands pirates. When the Hawk was built, men watched the placing of her timbers, saw the tall pine masts brought from Nuin’s northern province of Hampsher, and they said she would sink on launching. She sailed bravely for months, before fire destroyed her off Provintown Island . Something in us remembers her, where her blackened bones must lie in the dark making a home for octopus or the great sea snakes. And we heard the same prophecy about the Morning Star . They saw her launched, the masts were stepped, the sails took hold of the sky, she went through her trials in Plimoth Bay like a lady walking on a lawn — they said she’d capsize at the first gale. Well, we have weathered more than one storm since we began our journey toward the sun’s rising.

The world is round. I don’t think you walk upsydown carrying your heads under your shoulders. If you do I’m wasting my time, for to understand the book I mean to write a man would need to have a head fastened on at the upper end of his neck, and use it now and then.

Our captain Sir Andrew Barr would also be damn surprised to find you walking upsydown, and so would my two best-loved, Nickie my wife and Dion Morgan Morganson lately Regent of Nuin — who are partly responsible for this book, by the way: they urged me into writing it and now watch me sweat. Captain Barr suggests further that anyone who seriously entertained that upsydown mahooha would almost certainly piss to windward.

There were enough maps and other items of scientific information at the secret library of the Heretics in Old City of Nuin to give us a fair picture of the world as it was some four hundred years ago and as it must be now. The rise in sea level, which seems to have been catastrophically rapid during the period when Old-Time civilization went phut, makes a liar out of any Old-Time map so far as coastlines are concerned. The wrath of the world’s waters would have been responsible for many inland changes too — earthquake, landslip, erosion of high ground in the prolonged torrential rains that John Barth describes in his (forbidden) journal.

Well, of course it’s the truth, the many kinds of truth in the old books that causes the Church to forbid most of them, and to describe all the Old-Time knowledge as ‘primitive legend.’ It won’t do to have a picture of this earth so jarringly different from the one the Holy Murcan Church provides — not even in a society where hardly one man in two dozen is literate enough to recognize his own name in writing. Too much truth, and too much ginger to suit the timid or the godly or the practical joes who make a good living helping the Church run the governments.

The earth is a sphere within empty space, and while the moon and the Midnight Star circle around it, it circles the sun. The sun also journeys — so the Old-Time learning tells me and I believe it — and the stars are faraway suns resembling our own, and the bright bodies we see to move are planets something like ours — except the Midnight Star. I think that swift-coursing gleam was one of the satellites sent aloft in Old Time, and this I find more wonderful than the Holy Murcan legend which makes it a star that fell from heaven as a reproach to man when Abraham died on the wheel. And I think the earth, moon, planets, sun and all the stars may be journeying, for a while or for eternity, but not, I dare say, with any consideration for our convenience — for we can if we like invent God and then explain his will for the guidance of humanity, but I would rather not.

Until I began it I never dreamed what a labor it is to write a book. (“Just write,” says Dion, for the sake of seeing me sputter — he knows better. Nickie is more helpful: when I’m fed up with rhetoric I can catch her tawny-gold body and wrestle its darling warmth.) I try to keep in mind how much you don’t know, how men can’t often see beyond the woods and fields of their homelands, nor beyond the lies and true-tales they learned in growing, the moments of pain or delight that may seem to make a truetale out of a lie, a vision, a fancy, or an error out of a truth as stubborn as a granite hill.